Hospital hires new chief of operations

David Hill took the reins this week as the new chief of operations for Sonoma Valley Hospital. He comes to Sonoma from Corcoran, where he was involved in the planning and design of the new hospital facility while serving for two years as CEO of Corcoran District Hospital.
Hill said he was attracted both to this area and to the job, which will involve pulling together the hospital facility planning.
“I was at a district hospital that was facing a lot of the same issues as this hospital is,” said Hill. Corcoran passed a bond to bring the facility up to state seismic standards in 2005 and the project recently broke ground.
SVH has had a COO in the past, but recently, many of the duties Hill will take over were split between various administrators. He will oversee a number of operational departments, including support services like housekeeping, engineering and dietary services, occupational medicine and rehab, radiology, the laboratory and the doctor’s professional center. Nursing will still be under Mary Kelly, chief nursing officer, and CEO Carl Gerlach still oversee finances, IT and human resources.
Before working in Corcoran, Hill was an associate administrator at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, which has 233 beds. Sonoma Valley Hospital has about 80 beds compared to 32 beds in Corcoran.
Hill said his career in hospital administration started with a college girlfriend who was studying to be a nurse. “She was always at the hospital,” he said, though he spent a fair amount of time there himself, working in materials management at the hospital while studying at Purdue University in his home state of Indiana. “I would deliver supplies throughout the entire hospital and I got to see how things worked.”
His interest sparked, he went on to earn a masters degree in hospital administration from Virginia Commonwealth University. He then worked with hospital staff in Honolulu to develop a residency program in family medicine, of which there were none in Hawaii at the time. He also worked in planning and design for a replacement hospital during that period.
Hill will work closely with the hospital’s facility advisory committee. They recently put together a request for proposal for a project manager who will work with various architects and construction companies. The planning process for the hospital construction is projected to take two years.